Latest market data

Stock search

Ever send an email and
immediately regret it? Or realize you've misspelled the
recipient's name, and want to correct it? Or just don't like the
idea of a catty remark about a co-worker sitting in a friend's
inbox for all eternity? Is the inherent permanency of email
crippling your style?

If you answered 'yes' to any of the above, Harvard Law students
David Gobaud and Lindsay Lin believe they've cooked up a
solution: Enter Pluto Mail, a free Web-based email service
or, more succinctly, the Snapchat of
email. (The name originates from the fact that Pluto's
planetary status was doled out, and then abruptly rescinded –
Similarly, "if you have second thoughts about something you
said, our service allows you can take it back," explains Lin.)

Thanks in part to Facebook fatigue, as well as growing concerns
about data breaches and NSA surveillance, Gobaud and Lin believe
that people increasingly want their online exchanges to mirror
their offline ones: impermanent, untraceable and therefore less
restricted. "People self-censor themselves online," Gobaud says.
"But if you have a conversation with a friend in person, you're
not worried that that it will follow you for the rest of your
life."

Pluto Mail's central selling point is its ease of use. It's not
really an email provider – you need to authenticate your main
email address to sign up – which means the service isn't limited
to Pluto's Web interface; it can also be used on email clients
like Gmail, Outlook and Apple mail. Unlike encryption services,
which need to be downloaded and installed by both parties,
recipients aren't required to use Pluto or install anything for
the service to work.

Similar to Snapchat, Pluto Mail allows you to choose when your
email expires (although the options, of course, are far vaster).
Do you want it to vanish ten days after you've sent it,
regardless of whether it’s been read? Five minutes after it's
been opened? Two seconds after it's been sent, just to mess with
someone? Because while you can delete emails after you've sent
them you can't erase their subject lines from a recipient's
account. Say you send an email to your friend with the title: Top
Secret, and then delete the message before she reads it. The
subject line will remain in her inbox, except when opened, the
email will simply state: “This message has expired.”

Like with Snapchat, Pluto Mail has an obvious loophole: if a
recipient takes a screenshot of your email, it he or she can then
save it forever.

Dodge the screenshot scenario, though, and once your email is
deleted, it's truly gone. "In settings, the user can turn on auto
eliminate so that when an email expires, we delete it from our
servers immediately," Gobaud explains. He insists that Gmail's
servers don't hold onto the email either and that, after a
maximum of three days, the email disappears from Pluto Mail's
backup server. In other words, your email is truly and completely
erased.

"From a security perspective," says Lin, "ephemerality can be
very beneficial." While Pluto Mail has generated excitement among
people like herself and Gobaud (i.e. the young and tech savvy),
Lin says there's also been a lot of interest from small
businesses who want more control over their ability to manage
confidential information.

Both Lin and Gobaud predict a seismic shift – anticipated by
Snapchat's popularity – in how we use and think about data.
"There's a trend towards a more forgettable internet," Gobaud
says. "Humans don't have perfect memories. Computers do. And I
don't think a world of perfect memories facilitates natural
communication between people."

While Pluto Mail is currently still in beta, you click on
this link to sign up.